There are three quite different ways of making an audio CD:
1) With an audio CD recorder.
These work just like audio tape recorders except that they write to CD's instead. They sit nicely alongside your other audio equipment, they have all the right connectors and you make your recordings in a familiar manner. The snag is that they use non-standard discs! These are difficult to obtain and cost many times more than standard CDR's when you find them, a problem that can only get worse. When was the last time you saw a Betamax tape for sale?
Perhaps you can now get an audio CD recorder that uses standard discs but there's still a snag. They do not allow much in the way of editing. They will make a CD which sounds exactly like the original LP, and that might be what you want, but you can do better than that.
2) With a computer.
With this approach you first transfer your LPs to hard disk. You can then do as much cleaning up and general editing as you like before writing the finished audio onto standard, cheap CDR's. The trickiest part of this exercise is the first.
Use the best record deck you can lay your hands on; there will be no way to restore sounds that the pickup never even picked up! The best pickups were known as moving coil. Some moving magnet (aka magnetic) pickups were also among the best. The only high grade ceramic cartridge ever made was the Decca Deram - and you must use a genuine Decca stylus.
Use the line input on the best soundcard you can find. I know of no soundcard that can accept a signal direct from a cartridge without making a total mess of it so ---
Use a top notch pre-amp with an input suitable for your cartridge.
DO NOT try to use Windows Sound Recorder. It's a piece of junk fit only for voice recordings through cheap microphones. I recommend a program called Wave Repair. If you use it only for recording then it's free. The repair part is shareware but is well worth trying.
Record each LP side as one big WAV file. You can cut it up later.
WATCH THE LEVEL METERS. I know it's normal on analogue tape decks to allow transients to go 'into the red' but the analogue recording process is very forgiving in this respect. There is a progressive 'squashing down' of the oversized wave peaks. (For the mathematically inclined, the transfer function onto the tape approximates an inverse tangent with its asymptotes at tape saturation.) An overdriven digital system slices the wave peaks straight off and the sound is terrible. KEEP OUT OF THE RED.
Once you have your sound safely tucked away on hard disk - at about 10 Mbytes per minute of audio so you need a big disk - you can clean it up as much as you like. Wave Repair is good for this.
The final step is to write the finished CD. You normally get CD writing software free when you buy a CD writer but, if you didn't, you can get Record Now free from HP's website - if you can find it! Be warned that, on my writer at least (HP 9150i), Record Now cuts two seconds from the end of the last track. You can get round this by adding a two second silence to it beforehand.
After all the effort you've put in you will of course use good quality blank CD's!
3) Pay somebody else to do it.
This could be a good option if you don't have the time or equipment but apart from the cost there are some important questions to ask:
What kind of disks will they record onto?
How much cleaning up, if any, will they do? Steep cut base and treble filters - the rumble and scratch filters of bygone days - DO NOT constitute cleaning up.
Will you get your original LP's back. This may sound obvious but some obscure copyright law might say that you can't have them.
And finally ---
There are many websites out there dedicated to the whole business of transferring LP to CD. Try these for starters:
www.delback.co.uk
www.cdrfaq.org
